Precision Tracking and Electromagnetic Calorimetry Towards a Measurement of the Pion Polarisabilities at COMPASS

In 2004 the COMPASS experiment at CERN SPS measured soft reactions with a beam of negatively charged pions on various nuclear targets. For this measurement, a silicon micro-strip telescope was installed in the target region. For the first time 5 silicon detector stations were operated simultaneously in the COMPASS experiment. A novel method of time calibration, with a clustering algorithm accordingly adapted, and refined alignment corrections were implemented in the analysis software. The spatial resolution of a silicon detector was determined to be 5 – 14 μm and the time resolution 2 – 3 ns. Combining the time information of all stations, a track time resolution of 530 ps from the silicon telescope could be reached. One of the key points of this experiment was the observation of Primakoff events, namely pions scattering off quasi-real photons in the Coulomb field of a heavy nucleus. The production of real photons corresponds to pion Compton scattering in inverse kinematics which is sensitive to the pion polarisabilities ap and bp. Key ingredient for such measurements is a precise knowledge of the performance of the electromagnetic calorimeter. This includes a study of the instabilities of calorimeter cells and an improved reconstruction algorithm. A data-driven shower model was developed, which was used for a timedependent recalibration of the calorimeter. A new cluster refitting method was used to recover position and en ergy of clusters containing passive or saturated cells and detects double-hit clusters. The latter are important, as the main background to the Primakoff Compton events stems from neutral pions misinterpreted as single-photon hits. The physics analysis comprised the selection of Primakoff events and the necessary steps to obtain the pionic polarisabilities. The measurement was limited by systematic effects of the apparatus also determined within this thesis.